JKR

One often hears of the “three Rs” of sustainability – recycle, reduce or re-use. Here are a couple of initiatives that play with the concept of re-using things…

Put up to coincide with New York Fashion Week in early September, Mother recently created the above campaign for Target stores in Times Square, using New York artists to celebrate the city and brand. When the posters come down they will be turned into 1,600 tote bags designed by Anna Sui. Ninety percent of the materials used to make the $29.99 bags comes directly from the posters. “We wanted to highlight our commitment to style, value and recycling,” said Michael Francis, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Target.

Arguably less glamorously, Kenco has launched a call for Britain to “go on a packaging diet” to coincide with the roll-out of its new Kenco Eco Refill resealable packs (below), an alternative to its glass jars. According to Packaging News, the Eco Refill packs use 81% less energy in their manufacture than equivalent glass jars that are currently on the market.

Which initiative do you admire more? For me it’s Kenco, because rather than talk about commitment with an imaginative promotion they instead offer a genuine solution. The Target campaign actually makes more stuff we probably don’t need, and excellent sustainability website Treehugger notes “Can a solution be truly green when you set out to create the problem in the first place? More important, should you be crowing about it?”. They go on to explain that the PVC substrate used for the posters is far from green, and suggest better alternatives exist such as eco-flex.

However, I do wonder if the simple idea of refilling core packaging at the heart of Kenco’s initiative could have a little more va va voom? If consumers are to be encouraged to re-use a jar forever, perhaps the jar itself could inspire such behaviour by being a little more “designer”, if that’s not a dirty word. Obviously creating a bespoke bottle for such an initiative (for example, one which replaces the paper label with an emboss, reducing packaging even more) would have cost and eco implications, but creating a version of the regular vessel designed to grace a kitchen shelf rather than a shop shelf opens up great design opportunities which might better engage consumers.

There are not that many examples of brands which are managing to pull off sustainability and style in equal measure (Method cleaning products are a notable good example) – it’s a tough challenge, and easy to snipe from the sidelines, but I think both of these examples pull off at least one side of the equation in interesting ways.